MSPs: Put a dollar value on security risk with MAX Risk Intelligence

Earlier this year, LOGICnow acquired iScan Online as part of its development of a new MAX Risk Intelligence solution.

Max Risk Intelligence enables Managed Services Providers (MSPs) to automate vulnerability scanning. In itself, this doesn’t sound like anything IT Solution Providers or MSPs haven’t seen from a vendor before.

However, if we take a closer look at the goals of MAX Risk Intelligence, it becomes clear the solution is much needed in these times of increased focus on cybersecurity. It also provides a great opportunity for MSPs to finally persuade their clients that cyber attacks are a very real threat.

Why is cybersecurity important to MSPs?

In the current climate of cybersecurity, with cyber attacks such as phishing, drive-by downloads and malware affecting businesses and organisations of all sizes, you – as your clients’ trusted IT partner – will be keenly aware of the threat of data breach these businesses face.

However, many MSPs I speak with share exasperation: their clients don’t understand the threats. They simply don’t believe something like a cyber attack could ever happen to them (“Who would want to target us?”) or if it did, they’d simply fix it like any other IT problem, right?

This attitude is something that keeps MSPs awake at night. Why? Well, when a client does experience a cyber attack and things do go wrong (and we, as MSPs know it will, based on our experience across the wider market) who will the client look to for help, or worse, look to vent their anger at for not preparing them fully? That’s right... us, the MSPs.

What I’m seeing is that MAX Risk Intelligence is the solution that may just persuade MSP clients of the real impact of cyber attacks. More importantly it may help facilitate the MSP to take proactive steps against a successful cyber attack.

Put simply, MAX Risk Intelligence helps MSPs to help their clients prioritise threat mitigation strategies based on the cost to the organisation.

Think about that for a moment. When you’re talking about cybersecurity risks with clients, they typically view the situation as one to be dealt with in a similar way to their business insurance – weighing up the real-world risk against the cost of mitigation and making a decision on their spend based on their findings.

MAX Risk Intelligence will allow you to express your clients’ real-time cyber risk in terms of a dollar amount – helping both you and the client understand the risk of not taking steps to mitigate the issues you highlight to them.

MAX Risk Intelligence uncovers three types of threats – sensitive data, vulnerabilities and access permissions. This data is weighted to automatically calculate a Security Number for each device, including PCs, Macs and mobile devices.

With data breaches, and various regulatory compliance issues being front of mind for both MSPs and their clients, Max Risk Intelligence can provide a convenient way for MSPs to express the risk to clients in terms they truly understand – a dollar amount. More importantly, confidential or sensitive data can be secured, before it is at risk.

Conclusion

Automated vulnerability scanning is something the vast majority of MSPs should do for their clients, but being keenly aware of the dangers that face their clients, and actually persuading them to do something about mitigating those dangers are two entirely different things!

MSPs typically find themselves losing sleep over the fact they know their clients’ IT infrastructures may be vulnerable to cyber attack, but their clients don’t fully understand the risk and so don’t assign budgets to mitigate those risks.

With the acquisition of iScan Online by LOGICnow, and integrating it into the Max Risk Intelligence solution, MSPs can not only automate the vulnerability scanning of their clients’ networks, but also express the results of this scan in terms that their clients will truly understand – money.